Various Artists

Soundway; 2011

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Discos Fuentes is Colombia's pre-eminent homegrown record label. When Antonio Fuentes established the label in Cartagena in 1934, he also established the Colombian recording industry, and over the course of the rest of his life built Fuentes into a powerhouse-- it's still an independent company today, releasing records at a prodigious clip. Fuentes died in 1985, but his legacy rings through Colombian music of nearly every stripe today. It was Fuentes who produced the first cumbia, fandango, and porro records in Colombia, Fuentes that oversaw the collision of African, Caribbean, and Colombian styles that gave rise to champeta and some of the country's other distinctive musical exports, and Fuentes that provided a home to dozens of the nation's most important musicians. Today, the founder's grandchildren run the label, hosting a massive collection of ringtones, desktop wallpapers, mp3s and CDs on their website.

So building an understanding of Colombian popular music necessarily requires building an understanding of Discos Fuentes, the same way building an understanding of the American pop charts in the 1960s would require learning about Motown. The UK-based Soundway label has been to Colombia for two prior compilations, Palenque Palenque, and Colombia!, the latter of which provided a sort of panorama of sounds released on Discos Fuentes in the 60s and early 70s. On Cartagena!, Soundway founder Miles Cleret collaborates with principle compiler Roberto Gyemant and Quantic's Will Holland (who lives in Colombia) to paint a vivid picture of the hot cumbia music stewarded into record by Curro Fuentes, the youngest brother of the original Fuentes family that founded the label. Curro Fuentes produced most of these tracks, and even plays on many of them.

This music bears a heavy jazz influence, and in particular a strong affinity with the big Cuban bands of the immediate pre-Castro era. Cartagena is one of Colombia's gateways to the Caribbean, so the sounds of merengue, plena, and embryonic salsa all made their way there as the bands on this set developed their sounds. Group musicality is emphasized across the compilation, though there are plenty of great, compact solos, such as the supple, trad jazz-informed clarinet lead on Lucho Bermudez's "Fiesta de Negritos"-- Bermudez was one of Colombia's first bandleaders to heavily absorb the influence of North American jazz in the 1940s, and though his style wouldn't be out of place alongside Artie Shaw, it works well with the chunky 60s cumbia sound.

In fact, listening to the whole compilation all the way through reveals a general tension between the old and what was then new-- they vacillate between using electric and standup bass, accordion, and organ, and electric guitars make a few understated appearances, too. One concession to modernity that's universally avoided is the drum kit. The beats are driven by percussion sections that are a lot of fun to listen to-- checking all the different ways the washboard-like güiro can lock in with congas, timbales, and claves to push a song along provides several enjoyable listens alone. On some tracks, the güiro's role is filled instead by hi-hat on the upbeat, which gives the songs that feature the sound, such as Orlando Fortich's "Yolanda", a funkier feel, though none of these tracks strive for anything like what we'd think of as a true funk beat.

That's actually one of the refreshing things about the compilation-- labels focused on 20th century tropical pop music seem to have become much more comfortable in recent years with straying from the Western funk-inspired sounds that originally sparked so much interest in the music of the middle latitudes. 1960s Colombian cumbia has its own effusive charm, and I like that we're getting to hear more of that. Discovering music from outside your own culture is a gradual process of letting go of what's comfortable and accepting different attitudes toward what music should aim for, and a set like this is a great next step for a listener who's ready to move past the old focus on funk and get into a different kind of groove.